


Blind Drunk, A Good Man

by missclairebelle



Series: miss clairebelle imagine prompts [5]
Category: Outlander (TV)
Genre: F/M, Outlander: The Wedding retcon, jamie x claire, trying to make canon make sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-14 22:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20608094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: A missing moment in which a blind-drunk Claire Beauchamp talks to Murtagh about her upcoming nuptials.My attempt to add some sense to Claire asking Jamie for his name at their wedding despite having signed a contract with his name all over it.





	Blind Drunk, A Good Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [abreathofsnowandwaffles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/abreathofsnowandwaffles/gifts).

> I posted this on ImagineClaireAndJamie on Tumblr absolutely _AGES_ ago and it never made its way over to AO3. If you have deja vu, don't despair. You aren't losing your mind. ;)

_ **Blind drunk: so intoxicated as to see no better than a blind man. ** _

Until the night before her eighteenth century wedding, the phrase had never meant much to Claire Beauchamp.

Tomorrow, she would wed a that beautiful Scottish virgin and become a bigamist.

‘_Great_,’ she thought to herself, letting another finger of whisky burn its way through her lips, over her tongue, down her gullet, and into the pool of booze already sloshing about in her stomach.

Too far gone to appreciate the fire of drink on her tongue and the burn of it down her throat, she just relished the slight tilt to the world and the fading of her peripheral vision.

‘_Blind drunk. Let’s do that_.’

Her body, emptying of sensation with each sip and gulp of liquor, was becoming just a vessel for heat. And she was just fine with feeling absolutely nothing at all.

‘Great,’ she thought again. 

In the last few weeks of her life, nothing more than a smear on a windshield of time, she had thought that over and over. 

_Great_.

She grabbed the whisky bottle by its neck from behind the bar and dropped some coins onto the table. There was something timeless about a bar –– no matter the century, what she had just done was to pinch a bottle in a way that was against any social norms. She did not care. She neither knew nor cared how much she left of the money she had begged off of Ned Gowan. 

She needed to go blind with drink, empty herself of anything even remotely resembling conscious thought.

What she needed most was _air_ –– to breathe, to fill her lungs with something other than dread and to shake loose the last vestiges of anxiety in her whisky-addled mind. 

Though, she was clinically certain that air would do little to abate the woozy swell of intoxication fogging her thoughts, she nonetheless stumbled into the cool after-midnight air.

She steadied herself against the side of the building and wondered, vaguely, what Jamie was doing.

Was he blind drunk, too?

Did he wonder what he was getting into by marrying someone he hardly knew?

Or was this just enough for him, knowing her name, having seen her face?

Was he getting pep talks from some man. (_From_ _his uncle, his god father, or a nameless stranger at a disreputable establishment of alcohol and whores? An eighteenth century mechanical description of sex: Insert Part A into Part B, again and again, release and collapse, sated._)

A hiccup rioted through her chest, the force of it threatening to bring up the booze. She clamped a hand over her mouth as if her fingers would hold in the explosion of liquor rising back up her throat. 

When she was certain she would not lose the contents of her stomach spectacularly on the cobbles surrounding the inn where they were staying, she giggled. It was a sound that was almost foreign to her ears, an absurd mirth at the predicament rising up and grabbing hold of her. _Good God_. Of all the feelings she had dealt with since the advent of this ridiculous situation, a sense of humor about it had not been one. In fact, this was probably the least funny situation she could find herself facing.

Black Jack Randall. Dougal MacKenzie. Colum MacKenzie. Everyone thinking she was a traitor, save perhaps that hulk red-haired man (_was he, though? a man?_) to whom she was now affianced, knowing little of. Adultery. A tie to this time when all she wanted, desperately and with her whole heart and gut and mind, was to get home.

“_Bigamist_.”

Her voice was small the first time she tested the word out loud. 

Smirking, she found a wall lined with a patch of bright green grass and slipped down onto her arse, hard. The ache of it split her spine and made her nerves sing with a pinching jolt of fire.

She said it again: “_Bigamist_.”

Syllable by syllable this time, punctuated only by a slight hiccup: “_Big–a–mist_.”

She had read his name on the marriage contract and memorized it instantly.

_James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser. Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp._

A cluster of syllables.

What mother, what father, had given that red-headed child that mouthful of a name?

She wondered what was written in his history –– a series of mysteries and secrets. In her own were secrets she could never tell: the first time she rode a bike, drove a car, saw a movie at the cinema, went to school, rode in an airplane, stitched together a soldier under the cover of darkness and threat of machine gun fire, made love to a husband on a picnic blanket. A husband who was alive but not and likely desperately searching for her.

“_Bigamist_.”

_Mysteries, secrets, no sex_. That was Jamie Fraser to her, alright.

She pondered, briefly, which of those mysteries and secrets he would share with her, if any. She could scarcely say that she knew the man, save the shape of his shoulders and the firm triangle of his thighs around her as she rode, the feeling of his unspoken erection pressing against her as they rode, the look in his eyes when she caught his stare, the set of his mouth when challenged, and the streak of a selflessness, the bounds of which had yet to be fully uncovered but which she suspected was boundless.

And this _wedding_.

It was not that her wedding to Frank had been some elaborate affair, having stumbled into a registrar’s office on the way to lunch with his parents. 

But this wedding with Mr. MacTavish (_no, Fraser… with all the middle names_) seemed particularly hasty. 

She wondered what she would even have something even charitably called a dress or wed him with clean hair. Or would she wed him like this –– sour with alcohol, greasy with worry, shining with the stink of her boozy sweat.

The thought of the wedding had started as a patently absurd idea, but now she found herself thinking through to the event as an inevitably. 

The reality of it all made her take a long swig, holding the bottle by its neck and taking a long draw.

“Ye’ll be pissin’ yerself soon if ye keep on like this.”

The voice came from beyond her perception. She cracked a single eye. _Murtagh_ –– grizzled, thumbs caught in his belt, one caterpillar-like brow raised.

“Ye’re no’ goin’ to get marrit that boy smellin’ like a drunkard. I willna have it.”

“Mmmm…” she intoned, swallowing a mouthful and wiping the dribble of amber liquid on her chin away with her forearm. “I’ll take a bath, then, and rinse out my mouth.” She made a _hmmmmm_ing kind of noise.

He made a reciprocal noise and sat down next to her. He too leaned back against the inn and reached for the bottle, fingers grasping at air as if to say “_gimme gimme_” like a child would. Claire had stolen the liquor fair and square. She was disinclined to share, but passed him the bottle nonetheless.

“So are you here to laugh––”

_a hiccup rioting up out of her throat_

“––at me, too? Dougal seems to think this business _quite_ hilarious.”

(At Murtagh’s greedy fingers, she had a sudden vision of _Frank_ of all people. _And why not? The man was her **husband** for Christ’s sake. _He had shed his tie and his collar was undone at a post-war celebration. He was laughing, singing and grabbing for her hands desperately. “_Dance, dance_,” he had begged, smelling like cheap beer and the cigarette he had snuck with a buddy in the alley. It was a wartime habit that she absolutely abhorred. At the time, they were post-war and tentative. They had hardly started to function together in the way of early lovers. They had not yet reconnected as people even remotely capable of saying and meaning “forever.” His tobacco habit would be something she had to work on _later_. He had cajoled her until she relented: “_Dance with me, my love_.” _Later_ never came and when she came _here_, he was still sneaking cigarettes.)

“Are ye listenin’ lass? Or are ye sae far gone wi’ drink there’s no’ gettin’ through to ye?”

Claire blinked hard. Once. Twice. Refocusing. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“I asked ye if ye’re takin’ this seriously. I’ve come from bein’ wi’ Jamie all day. I ken he sees this as no small commitment. Ye’ll be his wife until ye die.”

This time, she swallowed hard. Deception came to her like second nature. “Sure. Serious. Yep”

“He doesna see this as a way tae simply… bed a lass.”

Claire raised a single eyebrow, accepting the bottle back from Murtagh. 

The _sex_; she had thought of it, though shockingly little. She knew it would happen. She had it accepted it as an inevitability, just as she had accepted the prospect of a wedding.

“I have never labored under the de… delus… delusion that he needs an arranged marriage to get a wo… _wo_-_man_… into his bed.”

She slurred the words into a string, having known them to be true, but having never thought through them. It gave her pause, then. So what _were _his motivations?

“S’been war and loss, more war, more loss, for the lad as long as I can remember. S’why he is who he is, how he is.”

Murtagh’s eyes were focused on something (_maybe nothing_) in the distance. Claire attempted to focus on the horizon, vision blurring and burning with the effort. Instead she focused on the wooden post running around the perimeter of the inn.

“I ken ye’re no’ thrilled wi’ marryin’ the lad, wi’ bringin’ him to yer bed.” Claire tilted her head just enough to see Murtgah’s profile in her ever-fading peripheral vision. “But ye could do a whole lot worse than him. He’ll be respectful, treat ye kindly.”

“He’s a virgin whose name I do not know––”

_a slight lie falling from her, even though she knew damn well his name_

“I do not know how old he is.”

She sucked in a breath, still not sober but the words absolutely _pouring_ from her now. Oh _God_ –– the number of things she did not know.

“I know little of his family or where he comes from. I know nothing of his wars or losses. I––”

“Ye’re no’ in a position to be choosy, we both ken that well.”

“He’s a stranger.”

Claire fell silent then, fingers of one hand sinking into the earth to ground herself and fingers of the other raising the bottle to her lips for the same purpose.

At some point that felt a lifetime earlier, after Claire had seen Jamie with his tongue searching for something in Laoghaire MacKenzie’s mouth, Murtagh had talked to her then. He said that Laoghaire would always be a girl, until she was fifty, and that what Jamie needed was a _woman_. 

Vaguely, dumbly Claire wondered if Jamie had even kissed a woman before.

“There’s a dress, a ring, and flowers.”

Her heart skipped a beat and she lowered her head to her hands, grime from the earth smearing into the sweat on her cheeks.

“He’s a good man.”

Sometime later, Claire woke in her bed, quilts tucked up to her chin sunlight screaming through the window and burning her retinas. She was unsure of how she got there, but was strangely grateful for it.

_Something_ was making a racket, imploring and pleading.

She blinked again and again until she could bring the noises into her cognition. 

She was being roused. Her limbs rose from the bed, partly from her own hungover (perhaps still drunk) effort and partly from the urging of hands.

She was absent while she was cleaned dressed –– scrubbed and perfumed, powdered, cinched and pulled into a corset that marked her flesh, wrapped in fabric that smelled _clean_ but like another woman, pinned and curled until her neck was bare but for a few stray curls, maneuvered and moved until she stood in sunlight.

When they removed the cloak covering her and she saw him, she felt something. Not love, but something akin to curiosity and to hope.

_He’s a good man_. Murtagh’s words, his voice, flooded her ears.

A bow, words from his lips that barely registered in her brain. (“_Your servant, madam_.”)

A breathless search for words, eyes traveling over the ground, his feet, her own feet, back to his earnest face.

“I can’t marry you.” Her confession.

_He’s a good man_.

“I don’t even know your real name.” A lie to start their life together, but she needed to hear it out loud. From his own lips.

Oh _God_, his lips curling into that _smile_. The small noise he made. 

“It’s Fraser,” he started, nodding and knowing somehow. The offering was a benediction, a counter proposal to her confession. He knew –– knew her panic, the way she felt like she had her back to a wall and something closing in on her slowly. The moment threatened to take her breath away when he continued, his response to her confession intentional. “James. Alexander. Malcolm. MacKenzie. Fraser.”

A dumb, hand with a sweaty palm dried hastily on her borrowed dress extended to him. 

“Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp.” Refusing to make it a business transaction, he took her hand with both of his and gave her a slight nod.

_His eyes were so blue._

_He’s a good man_.

The offering of his hands, his name, that look. Together it was enough.

Claire lifted her eyes from their joined hands. It was not resignation she felt when she went into the church and said words and made promises. It was not the feeling of inevitability that came over her as she allowed their blood to melt together with her heart hammering. 

It was something else. 

Not love and not quite yet hope, but something in between.

_He’s a good man_.

Later, she would lie again saying she remembered only parts of their wedding. 

And somehow she knew that _he knew _that her memory was full and without holes. He _knew_ that it was a ruse. An early fib between two people, not yet lovers, spoken only to hear it again, told from his storyteller’s mouth.

_He’s a good man_.

And when his body was heavy over hers, reverent and earnest, she quit hearing Murtagh’s voice in her head (_he’s a good man_) and instead heard her own (_he’s a good man_).


End file.
